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Sharks cruise the oceans, gobbling up anything unlucky enough to cross their path. But tiny pilot fish make a fair living off the tidbits big sharks leave in their wake. They just have to know when to zig and when to zag.

Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com), which offers everything from earnings estimates to buy-and-hold investing suggestions, has a new strategy: Zacks Follow the Money Trader. It's motto could be: "If it's good enough for Warren Buffett to hold for 20 years, it's good enough for us to flip in one-to-three months."

It's a new twist on a longstanding strategy that lots of investors and investing services now pursue. Sites like GuruFocus (gurufocus.com) and Whale Wisdom (whalewisdom.com/schedule13d) track the SEC's 13D, 13G and 13F forms in which hedge funds, activist investors, and other big fish disclose their major stock transactions. The site titles sum up their follow-the-leaders strategy.

ZACKS' FMT ISN'T LOOKING FOR long-term buy-and-hold ideas. It's a momentum-trading advisory service hoping to catch the wave big funds make when they start filling a position. It can take weeks for a hedge fund or activist investor to acquire enough shares to move the needle on a big-dollar portfolios. This can lift a security's share price—if they don't reverse course, as big traders sometimes do.

Anyone can retrieve filings for free from SEC's EDGAR database (sec.gov/edgar.shtml), but that is a time-consuming process that usually nets scant information because the government doesn't require a lot for the "13" forms.

Smart money massages the information anyway. "Their filings are written in a way to confuse professionals, much less retail investors," says Follow the Money Trader-in-Chief Brian Bolan. "They don't want you to know who they are or what they're doing, so they spread purchases across subsidiary accounts and small brokers and all kinds of goofy share classes to lead you down false paths," he says.

For $289 and $100 a year, respectively, GuruFocus and Whale Wisdom filter the stream and add context to help buy-and-hold value investors make sense of these trades. But following the money is much riskier for those who swim in close to grab short-term gains.

Institutions don't have to file one of the 13D and 13G variations until 10 days after they own more than 5% of a company's beneficial shares, which can be a high threshold. A 13F filing could come as many as 135 days after a crucial trade; a lot can happen in the interim.

"Sometimes, it's just a hedge fund trying to pump up interest so they can sell out," Bolan says. "You have to know who is getting in, but also who is getting out and their past investing patterns to figure out their potential motives," he says.

You can't blame institutions for hiding their trades. Nobody follows the big fish more closely than other big fish. When one of their number starts buying, others often start, too. Bolan, a 15-year Wall Street veteran, has to compete with these sophisticated trading desks. Most of his gains, he explains, will come from institutions such as pension funds that tend to move slowly.

Zacks limits FTM subscribers. The rolls will open briefly in August for those on a waiting list (zacks.com/ftmtrader) for a discounted price of $995 annually.

Bolan also runs the Home Run Investor (zacks.com/homerun), a strategy for buy-and-hold investors. It looks for stocks with both a high Zacks rank and high revenue growth; it will take $100 off its normal $399 annual subscription in August.

Institutions don't always make the best stock choices, but they generate about 70% of trading activity, points out Bolan. Win or lose, they definitely make waves. He just hopes to catch a few.